Irish LanguageMíreanna Saoil - fragments of a life - is the well-chosen title of this short account of the life and writings of Seosamh Mac Grianna.
Born in Rann na Feirste in the Donegal Gaeltacht in 1900, he grew up in a family rich in oral tradition. By 1934 he had completed both the most self-revealing and original of all Irish-language autobiographies, Mo Bhealach Féin, and the most important piece of fiction hitherto written in Irish, his novel An Druma Mór. In addition he had translated English-language fiction under the Gúm translation scheme.
But, notwithstanding the fact that he lived until 1990, 1935 marked the end of his writing career and he was destined to spend the final 31 years of his life in the Letterkenny psychiatric hospital.
An Druma Mór opens in geological time, then narrows down to a Gaeltacht townland where the lines of social division are being exposed by a vicious dispute over control of the local band. The final section opens out towards the new world of Sinn Féin and the prospect of independence.
Mac Grianna took the republican side in the Civil War and his hostility towards the new state was vindicated by the fate which his writings suffered under its aegis. The publishing of literature in Irish had become an effective state monopoly when the government, in 1926, established An Gúm, which published original writing and commissioned translations as part of the work of the Department of Education. Thus, while writers in English found themselves the object of an increasingly repressive censorship, writers in Irish were being published by the censors themselves.
In An Druma Mór, Mac Grianna allows the life of a Gaeltacht community to be expressed through the riches of its own dialect, and in his hands the language has been transformed into a medium of modernity and dissident expression. However, none of this was to become known: the novel, submitted to An Gúm in 1932, remained unpublished until 1969 on foot of a belief in An Gúm that the central character might be identifiable. Even the 1969 text may be unsatisfactory: Mac Grianna agreed under pressure to make a variety of changes, so that the original text is probably not that published.
Disillusionment and mental illness combined to cause the abandonment of Mac Grianna's efforts to live through writing in Irish.
In 1940 An Gúm published Mo Bhealach Féin and included in the volume an unfinished work of fiction, Dá mBíodh Ruball ar an Éan. This ended with a famous colophon: "Thráigh an tobar ins an tsamhradh 1935. Ní sgríobhfaidh mé níos mó. Rinne mé mo dhícheall agus is cuma liom." ("The well dried in the summer of 1935. I shall write no more and I don't care.") He may have attempted to write a conclusion to Dá mBíodh Ruball ar an Éan during the Letterkenny years but, as it is thought that his personal papers were burned at the time of his death, one cannot be sure.
IF MAC GRIANNA'S literary work is a story of disillusionment and catastrophe, this is even truer of his personal life. We owe the surviving biographical fragments to the few friends who maintained contact and in particular to Proinsias Mac an Bheatha, an Irish language activist and writer, who persisted against extreme discouragement in visiting Mac Grianna at his squalid lodgings in Clontarf.
In 1958, Mac Grianna moved back to Rann na Feirste where family members, unable to care for him, had him compulsorily hospitalised.Mac Grianna married a woman, Peg, who may already have been married to someone else and they had a son, Fionn, who was reared in an orphanage. During the course of 1959, mother and son separately committed suicide.
Pól Ó Muirí has written a sensitive and perceptive account of the fragmented life of Seosamh Mac Grianna, a writer as much overlooked in death as he was in life.
Proinsias Ó Drisceoil is the author of Seán Ó Dálaigh: Éigse agus Iomarbhá (Cork University Press 2007)
Seosamh Mac Grianna: Míreanna Saoil By Pól Ó Muirí Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 131pp. €12.50